LEAD Action News Volume
14 Number 1, October 2013, ISSN 1324-6011
Incorporating Lead Aware Times ( ISSN 1440-4966) and Lead Advisory Service
News (ISSN 1440-0561)
The Journal of The LEAD (Lead Education and Abatement Design) Group Inc.Editor-in-Chief: Elizabeth O’Brien,
Editorial Team: Hitesh Lohani, Anne Roberts and
David Ratcliffe

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard.

By Rebecca Skloot, Published by Picador,
1st published 2010 by Crown Publishers, US. Extracts about lead chosen by
Elizabeth O’Brien, and typed by Gordon Lai, Volunteers at The LEAD Group
Inc

The word HeLa, used to refer to the cells grown from
Henrietta Lack’s cervix, occurs throughout the book. It is pronounced
hee-lah.

Back Cover Blurb:

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists knew her
as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cancer cells – taken
without her knowledge – became one of the most important tools in
medicine. The first ‘immortal’ human tissue grown in culture, HeLa cells
were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer,
viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances
like in vitro fertilization, cloning and gene mapping; and have been bought
and sold by the billions.

The tumor had completely vanished from the radium
treatments. The radiation treatments were just to make sure there were no
cancer cells left anywhere inside her… each morning at Hopkins for her
radiation treatments. She’d change into a surgical gown, lie on an exam
table with an enormous machine mounted on the wall above her, and a doctor
would put strips of lead inside her vagina to protect her colon and lower
spine from the radiation. On the first day he tattooed two black dots with
temporary ink on either side of her abdomen, just over her uterus. They were
targets, so he could aim the radiation into the same area each day, but
rotate between spots to avoid burning her skin too much in one
place…Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when
she’d be better so she could have another child. Until that moment,
Henrietta didn’t know that the treatment had left her infertile.

In Henrietta’s medical record one of her doctors
wrote, “Told she could not have any more children. Says if she had been
told so before, she would not have gone through with treatment.” But by
the time she found out, it was too late.

As HeLa grew like crabgrass in laboratories around the
world, a virologist named Chester Southam had a frightening thought. What if
Henrietta’s cancer cells could infect the scientists working on them?

…Researchers were breathing in the air around HeLa
cells, touching them and transferring them from vial to vial, even eating
lunch at lab tables beside them. One had used them to grow a vaccine for a
common-cold-like virus, which he’d injected – along with bits of HeLa
– into more than four hundred people. [Southam went on to experiment with
injecting HeLa cells into cancer patients, prisoner volunteers and
gynecologic surgery patients to see whether the cells were as malignant in
other people as they were in Henrietta. Southam “didn’t tell patients
the cells were cancerous because he didn’t want to cause any unnecessary
fear.”]

Page 167 and 168 PART TWO: DEATH; Chapter 21: Night
Doctors

…But the history of Hopkins Hospital certainly
isn’t pristine when it comes to black patients. In 1969, a Hopkins
researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children
most of them from poor black families – to look for a genetic
predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher didn’t get consent.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit claiming the study violated
the boys’ civil rights and breached confidentiality of doctor-patient
relationships by releasing results to state and juvenile courts. The study
was halted, then resumed a few months later using consent forms.

And in the late nineties, two women sued Hopkins
claiming that its researchers had knowingly exposed their children to lead,
and hadn’t promptly informed them when blood tests revealed that their
children had elevated lead levels – even when one developed lead
poisoning. The research was part of a study examining lead abatement
methods, and all families involved were black. The researchers had treated
several homes to varying degrees, then encouraged landlords to rent those
homes to families with children so they could then monitor the children’s
lead levels. Initially, the case was dismissed. On appeal, one judge
compared the study to Southam’s HeLa injections, the Tuskegee [syphilis]
study, and Nazi research, and the case eventually settled out of court. The
Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation and
concluded that the study’s consent forms “failed to provide an adequate
description” of the different levels of lead abatement in the homes. But
today when people talk about the history of Hopkins’s relationship with
the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is
that of Henrietta Lacks – a black woman whose body, they say, was
exploited by white scientists.